About
I have spent 26 years in engineering, from 3G protocol stacks and Wi-Fi firmware to cloud platforms and AI infrastructure, at CSR/Qualcomm, Intel, OLA Krutrim and Palo Alto Networks.
I have led organisations of 120+ people across India, Europe, the US and East Asia, took an AI cloud from zero to public launch, and ran the platforms behind more than $6B a year in revenue. Today I am a co-founder of NeoSmith AI, where we build codebase-specific small language models and a routing layer that sends each request to the cheapest model able to answer it.
I write here about AI infrastructure, platform engineering and running engineering teams: what worked, what it cost, and what I would do differently.
- years in engineering
- 26
- people led across 4 regions
- 120+
- yearly revenue on my platforms
- $6B+
- yearly efficiency delivered
- $10M+
NeoSmith AI · Palo Alto Networks · OLA Krutrim · Intel · CSR (acquired by Qualcomm) · L&T Infotech
Writing
Why my notes and my website live in two separate repos
One private vault for everything I think, one site for what I choose to share, and a small script as the only bridge between them.
Read the essayExperience
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Co-founder, Strategy, Product and Engineering · NeoSmith AI
Codebase-specific small language models behind a routing layer that sends each request to the cheapest model able to answer it. MVP in two months; enterprise pilots show AI coding spend down by more than 80% against frontier-model usage.
- Small language models
- Inference routing
- AI economics
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Senior Director, Head of Infrastructure Platform Engineering · Palo Alto Networks
Led the platform engineering group behind one-touch networking, compute and identity services for internal engineering. An agentic AI platform for DevOps and SRE work cut P1/P2 incidents and mean time to detect by 80% each, at more than 99.5% uptime.
- Platform engineering
- Agentic AI
- SRE
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Head of Engineering, Cloud Platform · OLA Krutrim
Built the team and engineering practice from scratch and took a general-purpose and AI cloud from zero to public launch in six months: compute, storage, networking, security and Gen-AI model services. Moved OLA group workloads off hyperscalers and grew enterprise revenue to $30M a year.
- AI cloud
- Cloud platform
- 0 to 1
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Senior Director / Director of Engineering · Intel
Led DevOps and infrastructure engineering for the AI, Wireless, IoT, Network and Edge businesses, serving Apple and hundreds of OEM and ODM partners on platforms behind more than $6B a year in revenue. The same headcount delivered 4x the volume at 4x the velocity, and validation automation rose from under 20% to over 80%.
- DevOps
- Infrastructure
- Validation at scale
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Senior Engineering Manager, Principal Engineer and Architect · CSR (acquired by Qualcomm)
Built and led Wi-Fi systems, integration, validation and certification; more than 100 million units of wireless software shipped. In-house certification labs and chambers saved more than $2M a year. Earlier, architected 2G/3G/4G protocol stacks and Bluetooth host software.
- Wireless
- Embedded
- Protocol stacks
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Software Engineer, contracted to Samsung Mobile · L&T Infotech
Built the RRC layer of a 3G protocol stack.
- 3G
How I work
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Cost is a design input
Unit economics belong in the architecture review, not in the post-launch surprise. I ask what a request costs before asking how fast it is.
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From silicon to service
Having worked from embedded systems to cloud platforms, I look for the layer where a problem is cheapest to fix, which is often not the layer where it shows up.
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Platforms are products
Internal platforms succeed when engineers choose them. That means clear interfaces, honest documentation, and measuring adoption instead of mandating it.
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Small teams, clear ownership
Most delivery problems are ownership problems. I prefer fewer, smaller teams with explicit boundaries over large groups with shared responsibility.